Can parents escape the ideology of intensive mothering? Reflections across social classes and geographical contexts.

This chapter provides an overview of our work on mothering and fathering across different social classes, and geographical contexts. It opens with a discussion of intensive mothering, viewing it as an ideology that is embedded within neoliberalism thus promoting a subjectivity which is displayed, valued, and recognised within market relations. It moves on to examine how this ideology plays out in the Swedish context and then the UK context, exploring how parental policies have both impeded and shaped the intensification of mothering. The chapter moves on to focus specifically on less privileged mothers, highlighting how the requirement to engage with the ideology of intensive mothering for this group often serves to reproduce inequality and undermine maternal wellbeing. In closing we question why intensive mothering ideology remains so pervasive across contexts and make a call to place care and caring relations at the centre of the economy in order to recognise and value a diverse array of approaches to parenting which are not reliant on the ability to access market structures.